Auguste Rodin 1840-1917

By Patrick Heath

Auguste Rodin, (Paris 1840 – Paris 1917), The Kiss, 1882, Marble, 181.5 cm × 112.5 cm × 117 cm, Musée Rodin

François Auguste René Rodin (12 November 1840 – 17 November 1917) was a French artist who is generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. Drawing influence from the literary works of Dante and the later Romantics, Rodin’s meticulous process of clay and plaster moulds coupled with his undying commitment to understanding the human form would allow him to create sculpture of unprecedented naturalism. Rodin is marked for his particular aptitude in conveying both tension and harmony through the positioning of subjects’ bodies. His catalogue is largely comprised of sculptures depicting men and women in amorous, sensual poses.

Rodin was born in 1840 into a working-class Parisian family, he was the second child of Marie Cheffer and Jean-Baptiste Rodin, who was a police department clerk. He began drawing at the age of ten and three years later his application to the École Spèciale de Dessin et de Mathématique, a school dedicated to educating the designers and artisans of the French nation, was successful. In 1857, Rodin made three unsuccessful applications to the École des Beaux-Arts, so he moved into life as a craftsman and ornamenter for most of the next two decades, producing decorative objects and architectural embellishments. In the years following his exit from the Petit École, Rodin joined the Catholic order of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament for a short time before returning to craftmanship. In 1864, he would meet his life partner, Rose Beurat, with whom he would have a son two years later. In the same year, Rodin offered his first sculpture for exhibition and entered the studio of Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, a successful mass producer of objets d'art. Following the Franco-Prussian war, Belleuse asked Rodin to accompany him to work in Belgium, where he would create ornaments for the Belgian Stock Exchange and began to exhibit his own work in the salon. In 1875, Rodin travelled for two months in Italy where he was inspired by the works of Donatello and Michelangelo; this excursion proved pivotal for Rodin, for when he returned to Belgium in 1876 he would complete the seminal, yet controversial, sculpture of a life-sized male figure called The Age of Bronze. Due to its impressive naturalism, Rodin would have to weather claims of surmoulage surrounding the piece in the following years, and it was his attempt to quash this criticism that pushed Rodin to later create sculpture explicitly larger or smaller than life.

Rodin’s mature period began on his return to Paris with Rose in 1877 a year in which his work was displayed at the Salon and a cast of The Age of Bronze was bought by Edmond Turquet, the Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Fine Arts. Turquet’s purchase of the sculpture validated Rodin in the Parisian scene and in 1880 he would receive the commission for an unfinished portal for a museum that was never built, this work is now known as the Gates of Hell. The Gates of Hell comprised 186 figures in its final form and many of Rodin's best-known sculptures started as designs of figures for this composition, such as The Thinker, The Three Shades, and The Kiss, and were only later presented as separate and independent works. The years during which Rodin worked on The Gates of Hell coincided with his relationship with Camille Claudel who joined his studio as an assistant in 1884. Claudel had a tumultuous affair with Rodin that lasted until 1892, though they continued to see each other until 1898. During their time together, Rodin made several erotic sculptures of loving couples. The 1880s was also the decade of The Burghers of Calais, probably Rodin's most successful public monument, and the exposition Universelle in which he showed thirty-six works together with Claude Monet at the Gallery of Georges Petit. In the 1890s, Rodin’s productivity significantly decreased; in 1891, Rodin was commissioned by the Society of Men of Letters to create a memorial for the poet Honore Balzac. However, instead of taking the intended 18 months to complete the work, Rodin became infatuated with the topic, and completed the commission in seven years. The commission was ultimately rejected, and after much controversy, Rodin decided to keep the sculpture for himself. Rodin had other preoccupations in the twentieth century, especially in collecting and writing. He acquired an impressive collection of ancient sculpture, also purchasing medieval, Indian, and Far Eastern work. Before Rodin's death, he bequeathed all of his work to the French state to create a museum in the Hotel Biron at Meudon. His sculptures and drawings would still have had a huge impact on younger artists. Henri Matisse was influenced by the spontaneity of his drawings, while Cubists and Futurists were fascinated by his sense of motion and the fragmentation of his human forms.

Rodin was a naturalist, putting greater emphasis on the portrayal of character and emotion than monumental expression. Departing with centuries of tradition, he removed himself from Greek idealism, and the decorative beauty of the Baroque and neo-Baroque movements. His sculpture promoted the individual and the solidity of flesh, and suggested emotion through detailed, textured surfaces, and the reciprocity of light and shadow. To a greater degree than his contemporaries, Rodin believed that an individual's character was revealed by physical features above all else. Rodin's talent for surface modelling allowed him to achieve a kind of artistic merism in his sculpture. For example, the male's passion in The Thinker is suggested by the grip of his toes on the rock, the rigidness of his back, and the differentiation of his hands- Rodin himself proclaimed "What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.”. This artistic statement is further explored in Rodin’s ‘fragmented’ works such as The Walking Man, Meditation without Arms, and Iris, Messenger of the Gods. These works were in part influenced by Michelangelo’s collection of Prisoners and they extoll the motion that fragments – perhaps lacking arms, legs, or a head can move sculpture further from its traditional role of portraying likeness, and into a realm where forms exist for their own sake.

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